Charles Metcalfe

Life and Work

A surrender of the official Imperial position so unexpected and so contrary to the intentions of the Colonial Office, as that which Bagot had made, provoked a natural reaction. Bagot’s successor was one of those men of principle who are continually revealing the flaws and limitations implicit in their principles by earnest over-insistence on them. It is unfortunate that Sir Charles Metcalfe should appear in Canadian history as the man whose errors almost precipitated another rebellion, for among his predecessors and successors few have equalled him, none has outstripped him, in public virtue or experience. He had earned, throughout thirty-seven years in India, a reputation for efficiency in every kind of administrative work. As a lad of little more than twenty he had negotiated with Ranjit Singh the treaty which, for a generation, kept Sikhs and British at peace. In the {159} residency at Hyderabad he had fought, in the face of the governor-general’s displeasure, a hard but ultimately successful battle for incorrupt administration. After Bentinck had resigned, Metcalfe had been appointed acting governor-general, and he might have risen even higher, had not the courageous act, by which he freed the press in India from its earlier disabilities, set the East India Company authorities against him.

He was something more than what Macaulay called him—”the ablest civil servant I ever knew in India”; his faculty for recommending himself to Anglo-Indian society on its lighter side, and the princely generosity which bound his friends to him by a curious union of reverence and affection, combined with his genius for administration to make him an unusual and outstanding figure in that generation of the company officials in India. Led by the sense of duty which ever dominated him, he had passed from retirement in England to reconcile the warring elements in Jamaica to each other; and his success there had been as great as in India. In English politics, in which he had naturally played little part, he identified himself with the more liberal wing of the Whigs, although his long absence from the centre of affairs, and the inclination natural to {160} an administrator, to think of liberalism rather as a thing of deeds and acts than of opinion, gave whatever radicalism he may have professed a bureaucratic character. He described himself not inaptly to a friend thus: “A man who is for the abolition of the corn laws, Vote by Ballot, Extension of the Suffrage, Amelioration of the Poor-laws for the benefit of the poor, equal rights to all sects of Christians in matters of religion, and equal rights to all men in civil matters…; and (who) at the same time, is totally disqualified to be a demagogue—shrinks like a sensitive plant from public meetings; and cannot bear to be drawn from close retirement, except by what comes in the shape of real or fancied duty to his country.”

Outside of the greater figures of the time, he was one of the first citizens of the Empire, and Bagot, as he thought of possible successors, only dismissed the suggestion of Metcalfe’s appointment because it seemed too good news to be true. Nevertheless Sir Charles Metcalfe had one great initial disadvantage for work in Canada. Distinguished as were his virtues, a very little discernment in the home government might have discovered the obstacles which must meet an absolutely efficient, liberal administrator in a country where democracy, the only possible principle of government for Canada, was still in its crude and repulsive stage. The delimitation of the frontier between Imperial control and Canadian self-government required a subtler and more flexible mind than Metcalfe’s, and a longer practice than his in the ways of popular assemblies. Between March, 1843, when he assumed office, and the end of 1845, when he returned to die in England, Metcalfe’s entire energy was spent in grappling with the problem of holding the balance level between local autonomy and British supremacy. His real contribution to the question was, in a sense, the confusion and failure with which his career ended; for his serious practical logic reduced to an absurdity, as nothing else could have done, the position stated so firmly by Russell in 1839.

Sir Charles Metcalfe came to Canada at a moment when responsible government in its most extended interpretation seemed to have triumphed. In Upper and Lower Canada the reforming party had accepted Bagot’s action as the concession of their principle, and the two chief ministers, Baldwin and La Fontaine, were men resolute to endure no diminution of their share of responsibility. (…)

20] Montreal, which, thanks to Sydenham’s manoeuvres, counted among the British seats, returned an opponent of the new Ministers at a bye-election in April, 1844, although the {179} government party explained away the defeat by stories of Irish violence. But Metcalfe’s extraordinary persistence, and his belief that the battle was really one for the continuance of the British connection, gave him and his supporters renewed vigour, and, even to-day, the election of November, 1844, is remembered as one of the fiercest in the history of the colony. Politics in Canada still recognized force as one of the natural, if not quite legitimate, elements in the situation, and it was eminently characteristic of local conditions that, early in his term of office, Metcalfe should have reported that meetings had been held near Kingston at which large numbers of persons attended armed with bludgeons, and, in some cases, with firearms.

Montreal, with all its possibilities of conflict, and with its reputation for disorder to maintain, led the-way in election riots. In April, 1844, according to the loyalists, the reformers had won through the use of Irish labourers brought in from the Lachine canal. However that may be, the military had been called in, and at least one death had resulted from the confused rioting of the day.[22] In November, the loyalists in their turn organized a counter demonstration, and the success of the loyal party was not altogether disconnected with physical force. From the west came similar stories of violence and trickery. In the West Riding of Halton, the Tories were said to have delayed voting, which seemed to be setting against them, by various stratagems, including the swearing in of old grey-headed men as of 21 years of age, and among the accusations made by the defeated candidate was one that certain deputy returning officers had allowed seven women to vote for the sitting member.

On the whole the election went in favour of the governor-general, although Metcalfe took too favourable a view of the situation when he reported the avowed supporters of government as 46, as against 28 avowed adversaries. At best his majority could not rise above six. Yet even so, the decision of the country still seems astonishing. There was the unflinching Tory element at the centre; and the British members from Lower Canada. Ryerson had used his great influence among the Methodists, and, since the cry was one of loyalty to the Crown, many waverers {181} may have voted on patriotic grounds for the government candidates. Metcalfe’s reputation, too, counted for him, for he had already become known as more than generous, and one of his successors estimated that he spent £6,000 a year in excess of his official income. “It must be admitted,” he himself wrote to Stanley, “that this majority has been elected by the loyalty of the majority of the people of Upper Canada, and of those of the Eastern townships in Lower Canada.”

Resources

Notes

1. J. L. Morison, “British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government 1839-1854” (1919), Toronto, S. B. Gundy

See Also

Law is our Passion

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This entry was last updated: October 29, 2016